DESCRIPTION

In its first form, ditto copies one or more source files or directories
to a destination directory. If the destination directory does not exist
it will be created before the first source is copied. If the destination
directory already exists then the source directories are merged with the
previous contents of the destination.
In its second form, ditto copies a file to the supplied dst_file path-
name.
The next two forms reflect ditto's ability to create and extract ar-
chives. These archives can be either CPIO format (preferred for unix
content) or PKZip (for Windows compatibility). src_archive (and
dst_archive) can be the single character '-', causing ditto to read
(write) archive data from stdin (or to stdout, respectively).
ditto follows symbolic links provided as arguments but does not follow
any links as it traverses the source or destination hierarchies. ditto
overwrites existing files, symbolic links, and devices in the destination
when these are copied from a source. The resulting files, links, and
devices will have the same mode, access time, modification time, owner,
and group as the source items from which they are copied. Pipes, sock-
ets, and files with names beginning with .nfs or .afpDeleted will be
ignored. ditto does not modify the mode, owner, group, extended
attributes, or ACLs of existing directories in the destination. Files
and symbolic links cannot overwrite directories or vice-versa.
ditto can be used to "thin" Universal Mach-O binaries during a copy.
ditto can also copy files selectively based on the contents of a BOM
("Bill of Materials") file. ditto preserves file hard links (but not
directory hard links) present in the source directories and preserves
setuid and setgid modes when run as the superuser.
ditto will preserve resource forks and HFS meta-data information when
copying unless instructed otherwise using --norsrc . Similarly, ditto
will preserve extended attributes and Access Control Lists (ACLs) unless
--noextattr or --noacl is passed. DITTONORSRC can be set in the environ-
ment as an alias to --norsrc--noextattr--noacl on the command line.

OPTIONS

-h Print full usage.
-v Print a line of output to stderr for each source directory
copied.
-V Print a line of output to stderr for every file, symbolic
link, and device copied.
-X When copying one or more source directories, do not descend
into directories that have a different device ID.
-c Create an archive at the destination path. The default
format is CPIO, unless -k is given. CPIO archives should
be stored in files with names ending in .cpio. Compressed
CPIO archives should be stored in files with names ending
in .cpgz.
-z Create compressed CPIO archives, using gzip(1) compression.
-j Create compressed CPIO archives, using bzip2(1) compres-
sion.
-x Extract the archives given as source arguments. The format
is assumed to be CPIO, unless -k is given. Compressed CPIO
is automatically handled.
-k Create or extract from a PKZip archive instead of the
default CPIO. PKZip archives should be stored in filenames
ending in .zip.
--keepParent When creating an archive, embed the parent directory name
src in dst_archive.
--archarch Thin Universal binaries to the specified architecture. If
multiple --arch options are specified then the resulting
destination file will contain each of the specified archi-
tectures (if they are present in the source file). arch
should be specified as "i386", "x86_64", etc.
--bombom Copy only files, links, devices, and directories that are
present in the specified BOM.
--rsrc Preserve resource forks and HFS meta-data. ditto will
store this data in Carbon-compatible ._ AppleDouble files
on filesystems that do not natively support resource forks.
As of Mac OS X 10.4, --rsrc is default behavior.
--norsrc Do not preserve resource forks and HFS meta-data. If both
--norsrc and --rsrc are passed, whichever is passed last
will take precedence. Both options override DITTONORSRC.
Unless explicitly specified, --norsrc also implies
--noextattr and --noacl to match the behavior of Mac OS X
10.4.
--extattr Preserve extended attributes (requires --rsrc). As of Mac
OS X 10.5, --extattr is the default.
--noextattr Do not preserve extended attributes (requires --norsrc).
--qtn Preserve quarantine information. As of Mac OS X 10.5,
--qtn is the default.
--noqtn Do not preserve quarantine information.
--acl Preserve Access Control Lists (ACLs). As of Mac OS X 10.5,
--acl is the default.
--noacl Do not preserve ACLs.
--nocache Do not perform copies using the Mac OS X Unified Buffer
Cache. Files read and written will not be cached, although
if the file is already present in the cache, the cached
information will be used.
--hfsCompression
When copying files or extracting content from an archive,
if the destination is an HFS+ volume that supports compres-
sion, all the content will be compressed if appropriate.
This is only supported on Mac OS X 10.6 or later, and is
only intended to be used in installation and backup scenar-
ios that involve system files. Since files using HFS+ com-
pression are not readable on versions of Mac OS X earlier
than 10.6, this flag should not be used when dealing with
non-system files or other user-generated content that will
be used on a version of Mac OS X earlier than 10.6.
--nohfsCompression
Do not compress files with HFS+ compression when copying or
extracting content from an archive unless the content is
already compressed with HFS+ compression. This flag is
only supported on Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
--nohfsCompression is the default.
--preserveHFSCompression
When copying files to an HFS+ volume that supports compres-
sion, ditto will preserve the compression of any source
files that were using HFS+ compression. This flag is only
supported on Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
--preserveHFSCompression is the default.
--nopreserveHFSCompression
Do not preserve HFS+ compression when copying files that
are already compressed with HFS+ compression. This is only
supported on Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
--sequesterRsrc
When creating a PKZip archive, preserve resource forks and
HFS meta-data in the subdirectory __MACOSX. PKZip extrac-
tion will automatically find these resources.
--zlibCompressionLevelnum
Sets the compression level to use when creating a PKZip ar-
chive. The compression level can be set from 0 to 9, where
0 represents no compression, and 9 represents optimal
(slowest) compression. By default, ditto will use the
default compression level as defined by zlib.
--password When extracting a password-encrypted ZIP archive, you must
specify --password to allow ditto to prompt for a password
to use to extract the contents of the file. If this option
is not provided, and a password-encrypted file is encoun-
tered, ditto will emit an error message.

EXAMPLES

The command:
ditto src_directory dst_directory
copies the contents of src_directory into dst_directory, creating
dst_directory if it does not already exist.
The command:
ditto src_directory dir/dst_directory
copies the contents of src_directory into dir/dst_directory, creating dir
and dst_directory if they don't already exist.
The command:
ditto src-1 ... src-n dst_directory
copies the contents of all of the src directories into dst_directory,
creating dst_directory if it does not already exist.
The command:
ditto --arch ppc universal_file thin_file
copies the contents of universal_file into thin_file, thinning executable
code to ppc-only on the fly.
The command:
ditto -c --norsrc Scripts -|ssh rhost ditto -x --norsrc - ./Scripts
copies Scripts, skipping any resources or meta-data, to rhost.
The command:
pax -f archive.cpio
will list the files in the CPIO archive archive.cpio.
The command:
pax -zf archive.cpgz
will list the files in the compressed CPIO archive archive.cpgz.
The command:
ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent src_directory archive.zip
will create a PKZip archive similarly to the Finder's Compress function-
ality.
The command:
unzip -l archive.zip
will list the files in the PKZip archive archive.zip.

ERRORS

ditto returns 0 if everything is copied, otherwise non-zero. ditto
almost never gives up, preferring to report errors along the way. Diag-
nostic messages will be printed to standard error.

ENVIRONMENT

DITTOABORT If the environment variable DITTOABORT is set, ditto will
call abort(3) if it encounters a fatal error.
DITTONORSRC
If DITTONORSRC is set but --rsrc, --extattr, and --acl are
not specified, ditto will not preserve those additional types
of metadata.

BUGS

ditto doesn't copy directories into directories in the same way as cp(1).
In particular,
ditto foo bar
will copy the contents of foo into bar, whereas
cp -r foo bar
copies foo itself into bar. Though this is not a bug, some may consider
this bug-like behavior. --keepParent for non-archive copies will eventu-
ally alleviate this problem.